Measuring Scrum Team Performance

Measuring a team’s performance is important, regardless of the team’s development methodology or the type of product that the team is developing. By demonstrating the value that your team provides to the organization, you can help justify the operational and capital expenses incurred to support your projects. Performance can be measured with a variety of metrics from the speed of product delivery to the quality of the product.

Speed of delivery is important, as the faster that a team brings new products and features to market, the more likely the company is to gain a competitive edge against other companies vying for a share of the market. Quality is equally important, as organizations cannot retain customers if they cannot maintain high standards that customer expect.

Quality and speed are both inherently critical to Agile development teams, as is indicated by several of the Agile principles:

• Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

• Working software is the primary measure of progress.

• Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

You can use various methods to measure the performance of an Agile scrum team by looking at the speed in which they work (completion metrics) and by the condition of the products and services they deliver (quality metrics). The following sections describe common ways to measure the performance of an Agile scrum team using these metrics.